Abstract
Paleoethnobotanical remains from the three Dog site (SS-21) an early Lucayan site located on San Salvador, Bahamas, are presented and compared to data from other prehistoric Caribbean sites. Flotation, in situ, and screen recovery (1/16", 1.58 mm ) revealed six taxa of fulewood and charred Sapotaceae seed fragments, Prelimanary SEM analysis of six chert microliths revealed possible evidence of the Caribbean ariod, Xanthosoma sp. (cocoyam, malanga, yaufia ) or Zamia sp. The presence of Sapotaceae and possible Xanthosoma sp. or Zamia sp in the archaeobotanical record can be attributed to a number of alternative explanations. The site's inhabitants may have transported these plants from their homelands and transplanted them to home gardens. An alternative view is that they exploited or managed wild representatives or created disturbed habitats that encouraged the spread of wild or culitivated forms. The pollen data from two Bahama cores, one from Andros, the other from San Salvador, reflect anthropogenic disturbance during the prehistoric occupational sequence. The increasing frequency of Sapolaceae pollen in the San Salvador sequence is consistent with the occurrence of Sapotaceae at the three Dog site. Finally, prevention and recovery-related issues are discussed. The study suggests that multiple means of data recovery must be employed to gain a more representative picture of prehistoric Caribbean plant use and floristic environment.
| This cycad article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Read more about this topic: Zamia Lucayana
Famous quotes containing the word abstract:
“Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Just as a chemist “isolates” a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.”
—Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904)
“The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)